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"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Unofficial B10 Logo Thread

So I took Brian's suggestion a bit too seriously and decide to make my own B10 logo. Let me know what you think, and let's use this thread for any logo submissions.

A couple of things: The "i" is divided into 12 pieces. The piece that looks like it has a raging inferiority complex represents michigan state. The arrogant one is us. The gradient at the bottom was included to represent the rich past, steadily moving into an exciting, wide-open future. The "Ten" is intentionally in a somewhat more elegant font than you'll see on any other conference logo -- it's intended to represent a collective focus on academics that is largely unique to the Big Ten. The lightish blue, sadly, is there out of neccessity. The other options were pink, teal and brown.

I mean how do you not realize what's going on in that picture when you're making it? I just dont understand. That took what, a couple months to get finally published as their logo, and at no point in that did the realize what it looks like? Not one person said ahhhh we might want to rethink that a little? NO ONE?? Just hard to fathom.

Tell me you can look at it and not start laughing. I've showed my wife the logo like 5 times and each time I crack up. And you're right - somebody got paid a LOT of money to come up with....with......with that.

Funny. But sad. I'm sure there were people who saw that BUT were probably members of a group run by stuffy, pretentious, self-absorbed nitwits (sound familiar???) who would react with brazen hostility to any dissent. Imagine the meeting going like this:

Normal Person: Hm hey people, you know, I'm looking at this and --while you know I think it's REALLY GREAT-- also it might be taken the wrong way by some people. Kind of looks like the dude is getting blown, you know?

Idiot Narcissist: I don't think it looks like that at all! You're just a pervert! How could you think that?

Normal Person: Well, I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin', you know? Just sayin'.

Idiot Narcissist: NO ONE ELSE WILL THINK THAT!! YOU ARE A CRAZY PERSON FOR THINKING THAT ABOUT THIS IDEA TO WHICH I HAVE BECOME ATTACHED! EVERYONE ELSE WILL SEE IT MY WAY RAAAAARRR!!! [eats normal person's brain]

The corn, book, and cleat are all just clipart. I wanted the logo to be able to be reduced to black and white so as to be readable after being copied. The book is for academics, the cleat for athletics, and the corn for the farming history of the area and the land-grant schools. The Apollo capsule signifies the great engineering schools in the conference and the role Big Ten alums played in the program with Neil Armstrong and the U of M crew on Apollo 15. The stars and roses are pretty self-explanatory.

Imagine you come home someday, and as fate would have it, there is an enormous amount of water spewing from beneath your kitchen sink. Now, let's also assume/imagine that you, yourself, have no knowledge of plumbing. It's clear that this is a problem that needs a professional solution, so what do you do?

HAVE A CONTEST!!!"Hey everyone, I'm holding a contest to see who can do the best plumbing on my kitchen sink! The winner will get a free turkey sandwich and the rights to wash his hands in my kitchen sink for an entire year!! And I'll tell everyone that you did the work for about three months!"

Right? No, of course not.

You wouldn't hold a contest to fix the sanctity and safety of your home, and you wouldn't open it up to the public for their best solution. YOU CALL A PROFESSIONAL PLUMBER and you pay him for his services, because it's a job worth doing right the first time.

WHY???
So often (and especially over the last decade when everyone became something called a 'desktop publisher') suddenly branding, or graphic design as a whole, is taken for granted. DESIGNERS ARE PROFESSIONALS who know their business, and yet so clients feel it is permissible to simply open things to the public for a quick (re: cheap) fix. And then five or six months later they're going crazy trying to retrofit the work into usable applications, or even pay a professional to fix it.

So personally, I'm not a fan of the 'logo contest,' and I think it only helps to water down the aesthetic quality of the business world around us. If you don't like what a professional designer did, that's another argument, but this thread reinforces the concept that it isn't as easy as it looks and maybe, just maybe, it's worth being taken seriously both as a service and as an occupation.

Six Zero, I love you man, but if the first plumber comes by, installs a new sink, and the next day the sink is spewing water again and there's a foot of water on the floor, you don't just say, "well, a professional did that, I should take the job he did very seriously." You get someone else to fix it. All it really proves is that it does in fact require more effort than an hour of fiddling around on the desktop, but if they came up with a good logo in the first place that would've been self-evident already. Sure, it's not as easy as it looks. But it shouldn't look that easy in the first place.